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The horror genre is most recognizable by its intended emotional effect on the audience. The horror film aims to shock, disgust, repel -- in short, to horrify. This impulse is what shapes the genre's other conventions.
What can horrify us? Typically, a monster. In the horror film, the monster is a dangerous breach of nature, a violation of our normal sense of what is possible. The monster might be unnaturally large, as King Kong is. The monster might violate the boundary between the dead and the living, as vampires and zombies do. The monster might be an ordinary human who is transformed, as when Dr. Jekyll drinks his potion and becomes the evil Mr. Hyde. Or the monster might be something wholly unknown to science, as with the creature in the Alien films. The genre's horrifying emotional effect, then, is usually created by a character convention: a threatening, unnatural monster.
Other conventions follow from this one. Our reactions to the monster may be guided by other characters who react to it in the properly horrified way. In Cat People (1942), a mysterious woman can, apparently, turn into a panther. Our revulsion and fear are confirmed by the reaction of the woman's husband and his coworker. In contrast, we know that E.T. is not a horror film because, although the alien is unnatural, he is not threatening, and the children do not react to him as if he is.
The horror plot will often start with the monster's attack on normal life. In response, the other characters must discover that the monster is at large and try to destroy it. (In some cases, as when a character is possessed by demons, others may seek to rescue him or her.) This plot can be developed in various ways -- by having the monster launch a series of attacks, by having people in authority resist believing that the monster exists, or by blocking the characters' efforts to destroy it. In The Exorcist, for example, the characters only gradually discover that Regan is possessed; after they realize this, they still must struggle to drive the demon out.
The genre's characteristic themes also stem from the intended response. If the monster horrifies us because it violates the laws of nature we know, the genre is well suited to suggest the limits of human knowledge. It is probably significant that the skeptical authorities who must be convinced of the monster's existence are often scientists. In other cases, the scientists themselves unintentionally unleash monsters through their risky experiments. A common convention of this type of plot has the characters concluding that there are some things that humans are not meant to know. Another common thematic pattern of the horror film plays on fears about the environment, as when nuclear accidents and other human-made disasters create mutant monsters like the giant ants in Them!
Not surprisingly, the iconography of the horror film includes settings where monsters might be expected to lurk. The old dark house where a group of potential victims gather was popularized by The Cat and the Canary in 1927 and has been used recently for The Haunting (1999) and The Others (2001). Cemeteries can yield the walking dead; scientists' laboratories, the artificial human (as in Frankenstein). Filmmakers have played off these conventions cleverly, as when Hitchcock juxtaposed a mundane motel with a sinister, decaying mansion in Psycho, or when George Romero had humans battle zombies in a shopping mall in Dawn of the Dead. The slasher genre has made superhuman killers invade everyday settings such as summer camps and suburban neighborhoods.
Heavy makeup is unusually prominent in the iconography of horror. A furry face and hands can signal transformation into a werewolf, while shriveled skin indicates a mummy. Some actors have specialized in transforming themselves into many frightening figures. Lon Chaney, who played the original Phantom in The Phantom of the Opera (1925), was known as "the man of a thousand faces." Boris Karloff's makeup as Frankenstein's monster in Frankenstein (1930) rendered him so unrecognizable that the credits of his next film informed viewers that it featured the same actor. More recently, computer special effects have supplemented makeup in transforming actors into monsters.
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The horror film has sustained an audience for over 30 years. Its longevity has set scholars looking for cultural explanations. Many critics suggest that the 1970s subgenre of family horror films, such as The Exorcist and Poltergeist, reflects social concerns about the breakup of American families. Others suggest that the genre's questioning of normality and traditional categories is in tune with both the post-Vietnam and the post-Cold War eras: Viewers may be uncertain of their fundamental beliefs about the world and their place in it. The continuing popularity of the teen-oriented slasher series from the 1980s to the present might reflect young people's fascination with and simultaneous anxieties about sexuality and violence. Fans are also drawn by the sophisticated special effects and makeup, so filmmakers compete to show ever gorier and more grotesque imagery. For all these reasons, horror-film conventions grew so pervasive that parodies such as the Scary Movie franchise and Shaun of the Dead became as popular as the films they mocked. Through genre mixing and the give-and-take between audience tastes and filmmakers' ambitions, the horror film has displayed that balance of convention and innovation basic to any genre.
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